To Dream of the Dead

‘And the evil in your church.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘With its pagan carvings and its worship of the orchard.’ Shirley’s quivering forefinger suddenly extending across the counter. ‘Why do you not eat what God has provided for you?’

‘Let’s not get sidetracked, Shirley, you don’t know what I eat. Tell me about the evil.’

‘I see what you buy. I know the filth you read. I told that woman, you should not allow that filth—’

‘Oh, that filth.’

‘Her shop’s cursed. Full of demons. The witch’s shop.’

Oh, for—

‘You mean Lucy Devenish?’

Not hard to imagine how Lucy would have reacted to a woman able to toss paganism, atheism and vegetarianism together, without any forethought, into the drawer marked hate.

Shirley drew back her shoulders, bulked herself out.

‘And who’s lit the beacon for The Baptist to the Antichrist?’

Silence. The strangeness of no traffic.

‘That woman was laughing at me,’ Shirley said. ‘Always so clever, these Londoners. She laughed. She said, do you know who bought that book?’

A rare gash of winter sunlight struck white sparks from the chromium rim of a freezer.

‘You fooled me at first. Just like you’ve fooled so many others.’ Shirley raised an arm like a club, aiming a forefinger that no longer quivered. ‘You are the doorway. You lit the beacon!’

Seen soldiers turn from perfectly serviceable fighting chaps to Bible-punching lunatics after one week’s leave, James Bull-Davies had said.

Took a little longer with Shirley. Attaching herself to the curate in Leominster, laundering his vestments, polishing his car, before he’d fled down south. After which, she’d moved to Ledwardine, appointing herself as Merrily’s eucharistic handmaiden. Hesitant at first, faintly fawning.

Then the knife going in. Another feature of fundamentalism was the need to cosy up to people perceived as being touched by holiness, and then to demonise them when you moved on.

Shirley stood in silence, hands clenched above her chest now, as if in defiant prayer. Merrily felt guilty. Where was the woman underneath and what had she ever done to reach her? Recalling her faint embarrassment, discomfort at the altar. Maybe all this was her fault.

Shirley lowered her head to stare directly into Merrily’s eyes.

‘The reason I come to your shoddy services and listen to your socalled sermons is to hold up the light so that all may see what you are. It hasn’t gone unnoticed, Merrily Watkins, the way you’ve been dismantling the Christian framework. Reducing the hymns, so that voices are no longer raised in praise. Replacing Evensong with your so- called quiet time, when the demonic can enter in.’

‘Shirley, who exactly runs your church?’

‘All sitting under their candles and opening their hearts to the demonic in the silence that should be full of praise.’

‘Who runs the Church of the Lord of the Light, Shirley?’

‘The Elders. And I am one of them now. Learning to preach the Word of God.’

And already beginning to master that key technique of making everything, no matter how bonkers, sound like holy writ.

‘What about America? Who runs the church’s website in America?’

‘I don’t have to answer your questions. Do you think we’re stupid?’ Shirley began shaking her head very fast like she was trying to present a moving target to incoming demons. ‘Your Church… founded upon lust… is a nest of maggots! First it was women, now it’s homos and perverts. Men who stick their things into other men and think they can preach the word of God.’

‘So what about the founder of the Church of the Lord of the Light?’ Merrily said. ‘What about a priest who inserts a crucifix into a woman’s vagina?’

She felt sick for a moment. Sick at herself for resorting to this. And what if James had got it wrong about Ellis?

Shirley’s mouth had opened like a cavern in a cliff face, air rushing in. Her eyes bulged and her hands grasped the till as if she was about to lift it and hurl it at Merrily across the counter.

‘Why don’t you ask him about it, Shirley? Send him an email.’

Time to go. This was a wasted exercise. If there’d ever been a chance to get through to Shirley West, she’d missed it.

‘Don’t think you weren’t seen,’ Shirley whispered as the shop door opened with a ping of the bell. ‘Walking with the Baptist in the place of stones.’

Edna Huws, the organist, came in with two shopping bags.

‘Isn’t it awful, Merrily? I didn’t know until I switched on breakfast television. I’d gone to bed early, thought it was drunks in the street. Trapped in our own village! I don’t know what’s happening to our world.’

‘We were just talking about that,’ Merrily said.

‘Mr Davies wants me to move out. I won’t go. I told him, I’ve spent the last thirty Christmases in that house, quietly, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, and leaving it only to play the organ in church, the best service of all the year, and I won’t have many more years and I won’t be evicted on Christmas Eve.’ She peered into Merrily’s face. ‘But it won’t happen, will it, Mrs Watkins? It won’t come any further up Church Street. Will it?’

‘We’re all praying it won’t, Miss Huws.’

‘Thank you. Thank you. Oh, good morning, Mrs West. Isn’t it terrible?’

‘It is indeed, Miss Huws.’ Shirley’s arms dropping to her sides. ‘What can I get you, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Just twenty Silk Cut, please, Shirley.’

Shirley smiled.

‘I’m afraid we’re out of cigarettes today, Mrs Watkins.’

Merrily looked up at the shelves, saw packets of pipe tobacco and Rizla papers.

‘Mr Prosser doesn’t keep many now, look. Sold the lot last night. Panic buying. You know what people are like. He was expecting a new delivery today. Not gonner happen now, is it? Now we are an island.’

Shirley West, triumphant.

48 History and Fear

The blue stretch Land Rover was parked on derelict ground on the edge of the Plascarreg — south of the Wye but not as far south as it had been last night. The Wye was hungry and taking big bites out of Hereford.

Bliss walked back very slowly, past the shell of a black Nissan Micra, twocked and burned out. Without the waxy sky above it and the rainwater pool underneath, you could imagine that Jumbo’s blue wagon was an armoured car in the ruins of Baghdad.

For once, even Bliss fitted in. He was wearing what Naomi called Daddy’s SAS kit: Army-surplus camouflage jacket, cargo trousers, hiking boots, green beanie. He’d climbed down from the Land Rover and walked around the brown concrete fringe of the estate for maybe ten minutes, on his own, trying to get his head round this.

‘Feeling better now, is it, Mr B?’

Jumbo Humphries leaning out of the driver’s window, offering him a swig of a half-bottle of Bells. Bliss shook his head, went round and got back in on the other side.

Better would not describe how he was feeling.

‘Jumbo,’ he said. ‘Move this heap somewhere else, would you? If I was a cop and I saw a Land Rover on the Plascarreg…’